artificial intelligence
37 articles
The Eureka Machine: What It Takes for AI to Do Science
A review of Richard Socher’s The Eureka Machine: scientific AI, experimental evidence, human judgment, and the work between prediction and discovery.
Two vendors, one standard: running a real upgrade with synthesis engineering
A real three-day upgrade with two AI vendors exposed the Built/Deployed Gap: controls and records that passed checks but never reached the running system.
The Decision Packet: batching AI agents' questions without rubber-stamping them
A synthesis engineering pattern for staying in command of AI agents at speed: collect every decision they owe you into one honest, reviewable page.
The migration that was finished until a stranger looked
A synthesis engineering story about Blind-Spot Rotation: how an AI reviewer with fresh context can find gaps the original inventory and checks missed.
What agent memory research taught me about twenty years of notes
Tiered memory for a personal knowledge base: what MemGPT, Zep, and Mem0 teach about structuring two decades of notes so AI agents find the right ten files.
Ask Your AI to Refute You, Not to Review You
AI review defaults to confirmation. A refutation protocol: hostile lenses, uncertainty charged against the work, findings that must survive their own panel.
For AI disclosure guards, the secret isn't the name. It's the approval.
Name blacklists over-block your published biography and under-block real leaks. A disclosure model for AI agents built on approval, provenance, and five tests.
Your AI Assistant's Memory Isn't Actually Yours
Three questions show why your AI coding assistant's built-in memory isn't a durable record — portable, synced, versioned — plus a worked audit proving it.
The Synthesis Thinking Framework: A Practitioner's Guide
Five thinking modes for technical practitioners who work with AI agents daily. A detailed methodology with real examples from managing sixty concurrent AI colla
Your AI Is a Thinking Partner. You're Using It as a Search Engine.
Most leaders ask AI for answers. The ones gaining a real edge ask it to think with them. Here's the five-mode framework that makes that partnership work.
The Tiered Context Architecture: Managing AI Working Memory at Scale
When AI context files grow to 1,000+ lines, they degrade the collaboration they were built to support. The tiered context architecture solves this with three in
Recommend A, implement A: behavioral contracts for AI collaborators
My AI assistant argued for prevention, then implemented detection. Behavioral contracts in CLAUDE.md turn recommend-A-implement-B drift into a review comment.
When AI summaries become your sources
AI-generated summaries corrupt a knowledge base when derivative text is promoted to source. Not model collapse: no weights train, but the same failure shape.
Never verify a result with the tool that produced it
Orthogonal verification for AI-assisted development: check results through a mechanism independent of the one that produced them, and at every pipeline stage.
The hidden lesson of Richard Socher's career: AI makes engineering discipline more valuable, not less
Richard Socher built the research that powers today's AI coding assistants and then described exactly how organizations should use them. His 'managers of AI' fr
Bidirectional Learning in Synthesis Coding: When Human and AI Teach Each Other
Bidirectional learning in synthesis coding: humans teach AI through context, prompts, and review; AI teaches back by surfacing blind spots and edge cases.
The research lineage from recursive neural networks to human-AI collaborative development
Tracing the intellectual thread from Richard Socher's compositional representations through DecaNLP to the systems-level engineering challenges of human-AI soft
From learned representations to engineered context: what Richard Socher's research tells us about working with AI
Richard Socher's research arc — from GloVe to DecaNLP to 'managers of AI' — maps directly onto the principles behind synthesis coding. The connections are struc
The Part of Your Job AI Can't Do (And Why It Matters More Now)
There's a lot of anxiety about AI making engineering skills obsolete. But the most valuable part of what you do was never the typing. The judgment, the architec
RAG Architecture Lessons from Practice
Building a retrieval-augmented generation system revealed patterns the tutorials don't cover. Contractions break search. Not everything needs an LLM. Full docum
Data Format Contracts for AI Pipelines
When tools interact, implicit assumptions break silently. Explicit data format contracts prevent the debugging sessions you don't have time for.
Context Loss and How to Prevent It
Why AI assistants forget what you told them, and practical strategies to prevent it. The difference between context that survives and context that gets lost.
From Tool to Team: Managing AI as Distributed Engineering
When you're running multiple AI sessions in parallel, you're not using a tool anymore — you're managing a team. The skills that matter shift accordingly.
The Foundation-First Pattern
Why the most effective AI-assisted projects start with humans writing code by hand. The counterintuitive pattern that makes everything else work.
Synthesis Project Management
A lightweight project management system for human-AI collaboration. Designed for context preservation across conversation sessions, context compaction events, m
What is Synthesis Engineering?
Synthesis engineering is a professional discipline for human-AI collaboration on complex work. Not just better prompting — a systematic approach with princ...
How Claude's Memory Actually Works (And Why CLAUDE.md Matters)
Understanding Claude's context architecture changes how you work with it. The tradeoffs between automatic continuity and on-demand depth explain why persistent
What OpenAI's Sora Build Teaches Us About Synthesis Coding
Four engineers shipped a #1 Play Store app in 28 days using AI agents. Their approach validates the patterns I've been writing about — and adds new ones worth s
Scaling Synthesis Coding in Your Organization
A practical guide for CTOs and engineering leaders: cost analysis, team rollout strategy, training curriculum, and metrics for adopting synthesis coding at s...
Building ownwords: A Synthesis Coding Case Study
What separates synthesis coding from vibe coding isn''t the tools — it''s the decisions. This technical case study walks through the architectural choices,...
Why Synthesis Coding Still Writes Code in the Age of LLMs
The answer is not "just let the model do it" — and code matters more, not less, as AI gets dramatically better Last spring, my son Fitz and I had an aftern...
Vibe Coding and Synthesis Coding: Two Complementary Approaches
Why the conversation isn''t about which approach is better — it''s about knowing when to use each This blog post is for software engineers, engineering lea...
Polyrepo Synthesis: Synthesis Coding Across Multiple Repositories with Claude Code in Visual Studio Code
I wrote this blog post for software engineers, architects, and technical leads. It is code-heavy and implementation-focused. This weekend I was working acr...
Seventeen years ago, I built a tool for the open Web. This weekend, I modernized it using Synthesis Coding with Claude Code AI
In 2008, I released a WordPress plugin called Blogroll Links. The plugin displayed lists of links on WordPress pages using a shortcode. But the idea behind...
Synthesis Coding with Claude Code: Technical Implementation and Workflows
A hands-on guide to practicing synthesis coding (a.k.a. synthesis engineering) with concrete examples, real workflows, and lessons from production systems ...
The Synthesis Engineering Framework: How Organizations Build Production Software with AI
From individual practice to organizational capability: a systematic approach to human-AI collaboration in professional software development This blog post ...
Synthesis Engineering: The Professional Practice Emerging in AI-Assisted Development
Why the most effective engineering organizations are developing systematic approaches that go beyond vibe coding — and why this practice needs a name This ...